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I rarely ordered from Amazon before this year; my previous purchases were mainly for presents or were wish list or registry items. Before this year, I would shop around to several online stores, compare prices and save $5-10 where I could. That has all changed this year, because of Amazon Prime.

I signed up on a bit of a lark, mainly curious as to how I’d like it. Also because I’m ordering online more often since I work from home. As it turns out, Amazon has gotten nearly all of my online shopping business since then.

One click ordering, with no shipping charges and no checkout process has sufficiently reduced the headache factor for me that I am willing to pay more1 to buy a product at Amazon rather than another e-tailer.

I recently subscribed to feeds from TechBargains and Ben’s Bargains to watch for Dell coupons while I try to decide how to move forward with my next development machine computerpurchase. As a result, I’ve seen some rather good deals on peripherals and such that I could use and am tempted to buy.

The only purchase I’ve actually made came after seeing a Kingston 512MB SD card listed on Buy.com for $16.552. The % off coupons are good, but I probably wouldn’t actually get around to ending in the $10 rebate (bringing the total to $26.55, still quite reasonable) so I decided to see what this puppy was going for on Amazon. The price on Amazon was $34.19 and quite frankly folks, that is close enough.

The irony, of course, is that the Buy.com price also had free shipping (ground I assume) – so I paid an extra $8.36 for the mere convenience of one-click ordering and an upgrade to two day shipping. Well done Amazon; you’ve not only got me shopping at your store nearly exclusively, I’m even paying more to do so.

Until then, my online shopping dollars belong to Amazon.

Probably not more than the cheaper price plus shipping; not including the already paid Prime shipping. [back]

After watching the bargain site feeds for the last week, I’m seeing that some of the deals available on Buy.com are really quite compelling. Also, sometimes the tech items I’m looking for are not available on Amazon Prime. If Buy.com offered a “Prime” service, I’d likely sign up for that as well. [back]